FEver - FEdora version

General Information

FEver (FEdora versions) aims to be a simple and easy way to track upstream changes in Fedora's repository. Some packages don't provide any possibility to check their changes. FEver is written to check upstream version changes if possible. At (ir)regular intervals it checks for a new version and if it's found, FEver will put a new ticket on bugzilla (an example you may see here: #211783 or #220742 ).

The Basics

How To Enable Version Checking for My Packages?

It is fairly simple. All you need to do is to add your package to the list at the end of this page, in the List Of Packages section. Also you can add your package name to Check My Package Section and I will make everything that's needed to make your package be checked by FEver.

What Is The Format Of The List?

It should be easy to guess by looking at the List Of Packages . It contains three fields: <package name>, <file name> and <url>.

<package name> - must be the name of SRPM, CVS branch and spec file name. If your package spec creates a few packages you needn't specify them - only the main one.

<file name> - in fact, it doesn't have to be a file name but in most cases it is. <file name> is the regex used to check the version of a package. Usually, it should look like this: <package name>-(.*?).tar.bz2, but obviously it doesn't have to. I suggest to use a file name, because it is probably the easiest way to check what the newest application version is. You can find examples on how to make the regex in the How To Make Regex section.

<url> - contains an URL, where FEver will try to find the newest version. If your package is hosted at SourceForge, you should use http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/<package name> format.

How To Make Regex?

This is the most important thing in adding your package to FEver. I've made a simple application to make checking regexes easier. It is called [#fever-check FEver-check] (check the [#fever-check FEver-check] section to find out how to get it).
The first thing we should do is to find a proper URL, where FEver will try to find the newest version. Let's take bugzilla as an example. Its official site is http://www.bugzilla.org. You need to get to Download section and you'll find something like Stable Release (2.22.1) and few lines below there is a url to download bugzilla. Let's replace a version string by (.*?) and try to give that URL to [#fever-check FEver-check] .

It looks pretty good, but as you can see there are records like 'submit-0.5' or 'STABLE'. There is a possibility (a small one) that these unwanted records may confuse FEver check. To improve it, you can make a simple change. Program version always starts with a number, so let's try to put it into the regex:

Don't forget to escape ( and ) chars! You need to escape ( and ) chars because they are used on the page. Unescaped brackets are used by regex parser as grouping chars. So if you don't escape brackets in that case, they will be included in version string (and this is unwanted). Read Regular Expressions Syntax for more information.

FEver-check

FEver-check is a simple python script that makes creating regexes much easier. You can download it here . This archive contains two files, unpack them wherever you want to and run fever-check.py. Script will ask you for URL and regex. You can quit an application at any time by pressing [CTRL] +C keys. If you want to enter another URL than you did before, just press [CTRL] +D and you'll get back to typying URL.

Feedback

If you have any questions, suggestions, you found a bug etc. feel free to mail me [[MailTo(mr DOT ecik AT gmail DOT com)] .

Check My Package, please!

If you have no time to create your regex or you simple don't understand how to create it, you can add your package's name below and I will add your package to List Of Packages section. It would be nice, if you added URL aside of your package name.